Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I wanted to glimpse our pursuer,” Irene was explaining to Elizabeth, “and to lose him.”

  “Him?” Elizabeth asked, even more alarmed. “Perhaps Sherlock Holmes—”

  “Why would he bother to follow us at this point? After all, he has James the Ripper in his grasp, doesn’t he? He forgot about us the moment he joined le Villard in his carriage to convey James Kelly to the Sûreté.”

  “I don’t believe he had forgotten about you,” Elizabeth added slyly.

  This charge startled Irene from her reverie. “Nonsense. You cannot view with silly girlish wishfulness a man who is made of mathematics and test tubes. He relishes a mind that will not kowtow easily to his cleverness, that is all.”

  “But if that dreadful Kelly was maddened by our presence,” Elizabeth persisted politely, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes was made nervous. You must allow, Irene, that by the nature of my trade I have special knowledge of men of many temperaments.”

  “Miss Pink!” I said, forgetting my resolve to eradicate that unsuitable name. “Boasting of the wisdom learned from severe moral failings is not accepted here.”

  She turned wide hazel eyes upon me. “You make him nervous as well, Nell.”

  “I do not do that!” I gritted between my teeth, feeling the headache coming to wrap itself around my temples like one of Sarah Bernhardt’s lithe little parlor snakes.

  “Oh. I didn’t mean to . . . tell. Nell.”

  I shut my eyes. The headache was a boa constrictor and it wore the Divine Sarah’s face.

  “I am the only one,” she went on, “he took virtually no serious notice of. I choose to consider that a mark of distinction, rather than a snub. And also a mistake. So, Irene, I have been skimming Krafft-Ebing, if one can skim such strong stuff. You are right. If one relaxes and lets a foreign language sink in, you understand more than you thought you could. Case number ten is interesting, given the reaction of James Kelly.”

  Irene took the book from Elizabeth’s hands and laid it open on the table, under the bright halo cast by the oil lamp. Daylight did not far penetrate the heavy draperies and dark furnishing of our rooms.

  “An unnamed journeyman painter, age thirty,” she noted aloud. “Also a lower craftsman, and almost exactly the same age as Kelly,” she noted. “No family history.” She looked up to nod at Elizabeth. “A hatred of women.”

  “I do not understand,” I put in. “Why should any man hate women? We are the gentle sex. We are their sisters, wives, mothers, daughters.”

  Instead of answering me, Irene bent her gaze back on the page, and quoted: “A hatred of women, especially pregnant women, who are responsible for the misery of the world.”

  “That is ridiculous! I was unfortunate in that my mother died before I was old enough to know her, but surely every son venerates his own mother.”

  Someone laughed. Elizabeth. “Surely you are an only child, Nell, due to your mother’s untimely death. I am far from that, and I can assure you from my brothers’ actions that there is a time when young boys resent their mothers very much, especially when her maternal bonds would keep them from getting into mischief.”

  “It is true some of my boy charges could be most stubborn at times.”

  Irene’s forefinger tapping the open page of Psychopathia Sexualis interrupted our discussion. “As a boy this man cut into his own private parts. He was arrested at age thirty for trying to castrate a boy he had caught in the woods. He hated God and mothers for bringing children into a world of misery and poverty. He himself could have nothing to do with women for that reason, in fact he felt no natural satisfaction in any act.”

  This recital silenced me, even silenced my thoughts. One was not encouraged to think of such matters. Although I realized that country life had given me some knowledge of the raw facts of congress between male and female of lesser species, I had never, never attached such parts and conditions to humans.

  If Case Number Ten—dear God, how many like cases were in that book then?—hated women because they bore children, and James Kelly hated them because he felt it wrong to consort with them—even in marriage apparently, else why would he have stabbed his own wife?—yet he could not resist the prostitutes of Whitechapel . . . then Jack the Ripper was disemboweling women because they were women, whether they were mothers or whores.

  My thoughts staggered like a dipsomaniac’s stride. Jack the Ripper hated bad women because they were not good, and Case Number Ten hated good women because they were good.

  “Krafft-Ebing,” Irene said, “calls such cases as Jack the Ripper’s ‘lustmurders.’ ”

  “But isn’t the point of lust,” I burst out, “satisfying it?” Not that I had known either state, lust or satisfaction. I considered lust a male failing. One could not attribute it to the women of Whitechapel, or even to Pink. Clearly, their deeds were either driven by a need for money for the most basic necessities, or a lust for drink, perhaps, or—in Pink’s case—from a perverse intent to experience all sides of life, even its most sordid.

  “This is lust that has . . . relocated its satisfaction,” Irene said, eyeing me carefully. “If you were to read further in Krafft-Ebing, you would see that such men often have strange reasons for not seeking the ordinary outlets: marriage or prostitution. They block the usual impulse until it finds expression in the unusual impulse, the unusual act. For such men, murder and mutilation are what marriage acts are for normal men.”

  “And,” said Elizabeth, coming to stand by Irene and gaze down upon the open book, “it is as we concluded the other day when we first confronted the subject matter of this book. Such acts are common, not uncommon. We see the dead woman in the illustrated news, we shake our heads, we say who would do such things . . . and all along there have been plenty of clues to who would do such things, only our police have not been able to see them. And those men who have been caught have been shut away as merely mad.”

  “They are mad!” I said.

  “But in a . . . systematic, similar way, Nell,” Elizabeth insisted. “If so, is that true madness? There is reason for what they do, that only they know and feel and understand. This book proves that there is as much similarity among the abnormal as there is among the normal.”

  “This is supposed to be a comfort?”

  “No, Nell, but it offers hope of identifying men who may take women’s and children’s lives. Somehow they need innocents to purge their own guilt.” She turned to Irene. “Is it possible they see themselves in their victims?”

  “It’s possible that they despise weakness in themselves, and seek to disprove it by making other people their victims. Those smaller than themselves, perhaps.”

  “Mary Jane Kelly was not smaller than the Ripper,” I pointed out, “at least not from the majority of Ripper descriptions.”

  “And,” said Irene, “she was the only woman attacked and killed while lying down. He requires a supine, passive woman, this killer. He strikes so fast that the women literally faint from blood loss and sink to the ground. Does he see the mother lying to give birth? The wife reclining in the marital bed? The sister or child asleep and helpless?”

  “What does it matter what he sees?” I cried, repulsed by the vampire visions these questions raised as if from the dead.

  “If we see what he sees,” Irene said, her face transformed by a vision of a solution, thanks to her new insight into the crimes, “we will see who, or what, he is.”

  My heart was thudding like a Salvation Army drum. Notions and images and insights clashed like cymbals in my head. I stared at Elizabeth, unable to imagine her lying on the harlot’s bed, a vague dark figure bending over her, his face . . . any man’s.

  I saw the child in the wood, cringing away from the blade. I saw the woman on the street, screaming into the curtain of her own blood that fell red and heavy from her throat like a glittering garnet cascade.

  And always I saw the gaunt dark figure at the corner of my eye, the crow flying, the raven croaking, the ghost moaning, the monste
r laughing.

  He had always been there, and I had always chosen not to see him.

  Now he was looking right at me.

  Now he was judging me worthy of notice.

  Now I must see him in return, to let him know that I am not afraid.

  Now it is he, or I.

  39.

  Last Tangle in Paris

  From his early years the [he] fully understood that he was a

  man with pathologically corrupt tendencies . . . being both coarse

  and eloquent, hypocritical, fanatical and holy, a sinner

  and an ascetic. . .

  —PADENIE

  FROM A YELLOW BOOK

  It is worse than I thought.

  Which of course suits my ultimate purpose all the more.

  Yet, even I am shocked.

  It is quite amusing to find myself shocked by such a simple and low creature.

  Still, he has a crude force of personality, rather like a Gypsy fortune-teller or an assassin. One senses the depth of what he is capable of, great goodness and great evil twined together into an inseparable strand.

  Even he cannot see where one begins and the other ends, and thus he justifies them both.

  I have always believed more in sinners than in saints, but in my beast I believe that they both meet.

  The combination is demonic.

  I will allow him some last . . . excesses in this City of Light, and then we must withdraw. I begin to see how to use him in a larger plan of mine. Certainly he has attracted the attention of some I am most interested in . . . annoying.

  And he has distracted the attention of those who will pay dearly for that fact.

  What more could one ask of a wild beast?

  40.

  A Map of Murder

  The public would find those people who occupied their attention reproduced with a scrupulous respect for nature.

  —CATALOGUE-ALMANACH DU MUSÉE GRÉVIN

  FROM A JOURNAL

  I tossed and turned half the night on the daybed in the alcove off our dining room.

  When I dreamed, Indian warriors on horseback pursued me along the Champs-Elysées and then toward the Eiffel Tower on the Champ de Mars. I tried to escape into the catacombs, but followed the winding tunnel down only to find James Kelly laughing maniacally among piles of old bones and skulls as he upholstered the cavern walls where the lone dead woman had been found with a William Morris pattern.

  I awoke still hearing the implacable tap-tap-tap of his small metal upholstery hammer.

  Then I realized that the sound I heard was far more subtle and was occurring in the waking world.

  I parted the heavy tapestry drapes that curtained off my sleeping area. The double doors to the dining room were shut, but a thread of light gleamed under their edges like gilt.

  I didn’t bother finding my slippers, but tiptoed barefoot over the wood and carpets until I could peer through the tiny space between the two baize-curtained doors.

  Someone sat at our round worktable in the main room, tapping a clogged pen point on a thick pad of paper over and over.

  I slipped through the doors in my long lawn nightgown, feeling cold, but too fascinated by who was burning the midnight oil to find a shawl.

  Irene looked up from the layers of paper basking in lamplight. She glanced at Nell’s closed bedroom door and put a finger to her lips.

  “Something secret?” I whispered, coming to her side. I saw that a large map of Paris underlay the various scattered top papers.

  “Not secret,” she whispered back, “but Nell has just gone to sleep. I could hear her tossing her bed linens into knots.”

  “I have been riding stormy sleepless seas as well,” I admitted, quietly drawing out a chair next to her and sitting.

  “We have all heard more than we wish to know about these vicious crimes,” she said.

  “Not I. I wish to know all! I simply can’t sleep for wondering what will happen to Kelly now that Sherlock Holmes has escorted him into French custody. I suppose our role in this investigation is done. If the English detective is right, and I do hate the British assumption of lofty rectitude, Kelly will vanish into the madhouse at Charenton and never be heard of again. Certainly the French Siirete will not allow a public trial that would embarrass Paris’s most titled London visitor, the Prince of Wales.”

  “No. Events and personalities conspire to bury the Ripper as utterly as he has erased his victim’s lives. And the concealment is nothing new. I have the impression that this is exactly what the London police would prefer for Jack the Ripper: permanent, anonymous incarceration, so that he remains an unsolved mystery to the world forever.”

  “Surely they cannot safely ignore the curiosity of the public?”

  “The public will be onto another curiosity in half a heartbeat. No one is more fickle than the mob, even when it most screams for justice and vengeance. We are in a city celebrating that very fact as it occurred one hundred years ago.”

  “That’s right. This is the centenary year of the French Revolution. I keep forgetting that.”

  “The World Exposition manages to overshadow that fact, especially since the Eiffel Tower has replaced the notion of a guillotine of the same height.”

  I shuddered at the macabre idea. “It is hard to imagine such sophisticated and delightful people as the French being that bloodthirsty,” I admitted, curling my toes under the tent of my hem so they’d escape the room’s nighttime frostbite.

  Irene’s fingertips were white against the pen she wielded, but she seemed insensitive to such distractions as cold. She was making a tracing of the map, only marking certain sites.

  “What are you drawing?”

  “A map of mystery.”

  “The mystery has been solved.”

  “No. A murder or two may have been solved, but not the overall mystery.”

  I must have looked doubtful, for she glanced at me grimly. “Who shot at us near Notre Dame cathedral? A demented upholsterer? I hardly think firearms are likely to be his weapons. Who followed us from this same demented upholsterer’s lodgings when he himself was firmly in the custody of Sherlock Holmes and Inspector le Villard? Who watches this hotel, and our windows in particular, now?”

  “No!”

  “See for yourself, but be as discreet as a peaceful death.”

  I rose and hastened back to my alcove. The heavy velvet drapes were drawn over my single window, but I could kneel on the daybed’s foot to peek out ever so slightly at the side . . . and so I did.

  The street below lay knee deep in mist, as if a river of fog had flooded the cobblestones. Streetlights resembled drowned trees in a mere. No vehicles moved at this hour, not on such a sheltered byway.

  The row of chic shops opposite were shuttered, the residence windows above them all dark with drawn curtains.

  As I stared, uncertain, I saw that the black arch of one doorway was doubly dark. A figure sheltered in its shadow! With the mist-flooded street I couldn’t see its feet, nor tell whether it was a trousered man or skirted woman, though why a woman would be out at this hour in such a deserted place beggared explanation. Yet I viewed a cloaked and hooded figure, more womanly than a hatted or capped man . . . more like a monk.

  I shivered at the vague and sinister outline. Someone watched, whatever it was.

  Now I was shivering not only from the cold floor on my bare feet, but from the icy inner recognition of surveillance, from the fog of mystery that seeped into our cozy suite and restless minds like smoke.

  This time I paused to find and don my slippers in the dark. When I returned to the main room, Irene had marked several more sites on her map. I began to discern a pattern.

  “The Eiffel Tower.” She nodded. I indicated a spot a half an inch away. “The unsuspected catacomb where the third murder victim was found. But what is this mark over here by the Seine?”

  “Notre Dame.”

  “Where we were fired upon! With the Wild West Show in town—”

&n
bsp; “That was not lost upon me either,” she said. “But what else wasis—at this same spot?”

  Being shot at was such a novel experience that I could think of no other to link with the site.

  Irene shook her head, her chestnut hair rippling red-gold in the lamplight. She looked no more than twenty, save her expression was older than time.

  “The second undiscovered and likely ancient catacomb,” she reminded me.

  “Under the cathedral, of course. But . . . there was nothing there.”

  “Spilled spirits, candle wax. Or do you think those bones had held a recent soirée?”

  “No body was there, I mean.”

  “No. No body.”

  “And this mark?” I touched another.

  “Your former residence.”

  The ink had been still wet and my fingertip was blackened. “Two bodies there.”

  “And a wine cellar with signs of disturbance.”

  “But minor enough signs that the broken wine bottle could have been dropped by a careless servant, weeks ago even.”

  “Or Kelly could have waited down there. After installing the Prince’s . . . couch.” She leaned back, set the pen down, thought visibly. “You found the women at what time?”

  “Just after eight. We have our second meal of the day before seven.”

  “It lasts more than an hour?”

  “You think the girls would let anyone rush them? The food is as exquisite as that given to our noble guests. We are expected to work long into the night. It helps if we are plied with viands and wine.”

  “So the two dead women would have been tipsy?”

  I shrugged, hard-pressed to explain the life of serving men’s needs to a woman who had only ever served her own, as men themselves do.

  “Not so much tipsy,” I said, “as indolently mellow. Gay yet somehow removed, complacent.”

  “I cannot think of a better formula to create the perfect murder victim,” Irene said angrily, careful not to raise her voice with ire. “The women of Whitechapel were drunk as well. I can quite understand their need to dull sensation. I cannot have anything but a contempt beyond expressing for a man who would prey upon such helpless victims, however impaired his mind might be.”